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Monday, March 31, 2014

Deep thoughts and splatter...

As the morning rises, the Sci Fi bust contemplates his future colors... is more contrast required.. is the blue really blue or is the green needing more green... questions to be answered in time...

While he/she/it contemplates this.. I thought I would show a quick thing on the splatter effects. I have been asked a few times on what it is, how to do it, and what effect it gives..

To put it simply.. it is loading up a brush with paint.. and flicking it at the model :) Pretty simple stuff actually! Massive Voodoo covers it in their tutorials before, but more for blood and gore. I used it here on the bust to create different lesions and liver spots on the smoother sections.

The main things one needs is a palette with deep pockets in it, and a larger flat brush. This is what I use as I have it on hand, and it did/does the job that it is required to do simply enough.

Though you could use a smaller brush, but it is a bit harder to control. I have seen some use a toothbrush. I hope that it was not theirs though, or their significant others... Kids might be OK.. can never tell if that stain is paint/ink or food anyways so...

But anyways.. I usually just fill up the palette with 1-2 drops of Ink colors, and then fill the rest of the bowl with water. Mixed up and thinned down quite a bit. Reason for this is that we do not want them to be massively shown pieces against the model, but just enough to discolor sections of it. You can see that I have used a few different colors like Green, Purple, Brown, and Black. But I guess it all really depends on what you are trying to achieve really.

MV talks about using a toothpick to flick across the brush, but I wanted a bigger spread of damage across the model. So just used the end of my thumb like above. This does make a massive mess and horribly inaccurate as well which is why it gives such great random patterns. It is also why you can see the big cardboard piece sitting on my desk in recent photos. To catch most ( but not all!!! ) of the overspray of the splatter.

What kind of effect does it give though? Well this one for instance..

Really random, and in different hues and saturation. All depending on when the drop began to dry between the brush and the model, or how much water I used, or how much was on the brush itself. I really tried different levels of wetness on the brush before flicking it at the model to understand this better.

Though you have to be aware that this is just the beginning sections, and from here I was then smoothing out the colors. To fade them into the skin and give it a bit more depth to the model overall like below..

But yeah.. that is about it.. and in the meantime it seems that Mr Sci-Fi bust himself is ready for more paint... so the journey continues... enjoy!

I think you really used that to great effect and it gives the bust a sense of age and some life to it as well. I'll have a similar tutorial coming up on my blog in the next month regarding the different splatter FX you can get from various things like brushes, straws and tooth brushes.

Thanks Zab. That was the intent with it actually. I know of the other techniques, and think I could have used them also, but was seeing these ones do the majority of what I wanted so just left it at that! Now to just get back at the majority of the piece and see where it takes me :D